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While all eyes in the tech business world have largely been focused on Facebook lately, there’s another big player that has stumbled even more in recent months: Zynga. The San Francisco social media gaming company has lost about 70 percent of its value since its December 2011 initial public offering. As of this writing, the stock is trading just above $3 a share.

Worse still, some of its top executive and managerial talent are jumping ship, "as the online game maker grapples with slowing growth and a slumping share price that lessens the value of compensation," according to Bloomberg News.

Just yesterday, Alan Patmore, who oversaw CityVille, was lured away to Kixeye. Erik Bethke, a company general manager in charge of Mafia Wars 2, said on his Facebook page that he’d left the company this month. Bloomberg also reported that Ya-Bing Chu, a company vice president, and Jeremy Strauser also left this month. Chief Operating Officer John Schappert left the company on August 8 after disappointing earnings—he was only at the company for less than 18 months.

"It’s troubling when you start to see the plan not execute, and with departures, poor performance, the lowered outlook—these types of things are not great signs," said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner Research. "The more of those signs that we see, the worse off we’re going to be."

The company declined to respond to requests for comment beyond a canned statement.

"Zynga continues to lead the industry with the top talent in social game development," said Dani Dudeck, a Zynga spokesperson.

Is Zynga playing the long game?

Some have speculated that the company itself is ripe for acquisition. Business Insidersuggested this week that Amazon should go after the company. However, the company seems to be unwilling to sell—the company CEO, Mark Pincus, holds a majority stake in the company and said as recently as July that he would never consider a sale.

"I was upfront with everybody," he said at a PandoDaily event. "I said, ‘We’re never going to sell the company. There is no exit.’ I’ve said, ‘My only exit is by natural causes.’"

Still, some industry analysts said that there may not be reason for concern about the overall outlook on the company.

"The decline is because their older games aren’t monetizing as well as they did in the past, and they had believed they would be stable," wrote Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, in an e-mail sent to Ars. "I don’t think that they are in trouble at all, they still make money, and don’t think they’re sellers below the $10 IPO."

Blau added that one of Zynga’s fundamental hurdles, like many other video game companies, is that they’re a "hit-driven business." And that may mean that while Zynga hasn’t had a smashing success lately, there could be ones in the pipeline to vault them ahead.

"The risk is that if they didn't have a hit then there could be trouble," he added.

"This happens to game companies. If you look at the history of the gaming industry, you can see a trailway of littered skeletons, and I’m not suggesting that’s the fate of Zynga, as they have a nice war chest, and a nice infrastructure. They may have trouble, but in the longer term, they may have games coming out that do well, they may be fine a year from now—they clearly know the plans and we don’t."

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar